The 2012 British Urban Film Festival, which, for the first time, will allow audiences to watch some of this year’s program of films online (YES!), runs from October 12-14.

As promised, here’s the first of likely several film highlights scheduled to screen at the festival this year: Director Polly Steele’s feature documentary, Eastside Story, about the lives of the boys in the East End of London, who are mentored by a man named Ray Lewis, who dedicates his life to trying to keep the boys off the streets.

Synopsis:

It is a portrait of a controversial academy in East London; it is a portrait of the man who runs it, ex-deputy mayor of London, Ray Lewis, and it is a portrait of the troubled black boys in danger of exclusion that the academy takes in and attempts, by means that are controversial, to lead away from lives of crime.

It’s set in London, but this could very well be right in my back yard, in Brooklyn – the stories are certainly familiar.

The 2011 film looks like it would be a conversation starter, based on the clip from it below: